Hand-Drawn London

You gotta love this awesome highly detailed hand-drawn map of London. Created by illustrator Jenni Sparks and print company Evermade, the giant A1-size map shows the city’s boroughs and neighborhoods and highlights important and remarkable cultural spots — cool shops, pubs, clubs, local markets, et cetera. I noticed, for instance, the Boxpark pop-up mall that Dan showcased on this blog last year.

The print was designed and produced from the mapping of the actual geographic tube map, and covers tube zones 1 and 2, featuring landmarks like “the Olympic Village, the Emirates Stadium, Roundwood Park, Putney, Brockwell Park, Catford and everything in between”. The hand-drawn map of London is available on Evermade’s web shop for £130. Click here for more information and photos.

San Francisco-based artist Kathryn Clark used to work as an urban planner between 1999 and 2004. In 2007, when the foreclosures began to occur in the United States, she began wondering to which extent she added to this problem by promoting home ownership. Using quilts, she created an extraordinary series of visualizations, based on maps…

As we already described in ‘Trend 4: Pop-Up Everywhere’, the popularity of pop-up food concepts is growing, whether it is about pop-up restaurants or flexible food sellers. Of course, street vending is not a new phenomenon. Nevertheless, more and more mobile food concepts build their brand by smart use of social media. Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter…

Loaning is under pressure these days. However, a new bright lending initiative is emerging: Wonga. Wonga is a London-based socially responsible lender doing business a totally other way: it provides simple instant mini loans through the Web.

The site for the London 2012 Olympic Games has been surrounded by almost 18 kilometers of blue plywood security fence since construction began in 2006. Since then, the fence has been interpreted as a political symbol of forced regeneration and forthcoming gentrification. Local communities feel excluded from the process of what will happen in the period…